Jeremy Gillies

Poul-Henning Kampin applies C.Northcote Parkinson’s Law of Triv­i­al­ity in to explain the dis­pro­por­tion­ate atten­tion given to triv­ial details in soft­ware devel­op­ment . It applies rather well to design:

Should I care what color the bikeshed is? The really, really short answer is that you should not. The some­what longer answer is that just because you are capa­ble of build­ing a bikeshed does not mean you should stop oth­ers from build­ing one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indi­cat­ing that you need not argue about every lit­tle fea­ture just because you know enough to do so. Some peo­ple have com­mented that the amount of noise gen­er­ated by a change is inversely pro­por­tional to the com­plex­ity of the change.

To expand, wikipedia has:

Parkin­son dra­ma­tizes his Law of Triv­i­al­ity with a committee’s delib­er­a­tions on a nuclear power plant, con­trast­ing it to delib­er­a­tion on a bicy­cle shed. A nuclear reac­tor is used because it is so vastly expen­sive and com­pli­cated that an aver­age per­son can­not under­stand it, so they assume that those work­ing on it under­stand it. Even those with strong opin­ions often with­hold them for fear of being shown to be insuf­fi­ciently informed. On the other hand, every­one under­stands a bicy­cle shed (or thinks he or she does), so build­ing one can result in end­less dis­cus­sions because every­one involved wants to add his or her touch and show that they have con­tributed. While dis­cussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roof­ing is alu­minium, asbestos, or gal­va­nized iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not.